Dog food maker charges top dollar for starch and poultry by-product

Like many of you, I feel responsible for my dogs' well-being. I do not want to unknowingly feed them anything that is not nutritious or, heaven forbid, something that could really harm them.

When an announcement of a new dog food product by Royal Canin made with ground up chicken feathers crossed my email box, I thought it was a hoax.

Honestly.

But the joke is on me. It appears I was wrong.

In June, Forbes magazine published an interview with the pet food company's president, Keith Levy. Levy was introducing the new "anallergenic" formula" the company is producing made with ground up chicken feathers. The story was headlined "a win-win for Royal Canin," a division of Mars.

Seriously folks?

Levy touted the fact the company has been developing the use of chicken feathers in its pet food for 10 years.

"We're looking for lots of different sources of protein for our foods: hydrolyzed soy; we are currently researching worm meal as a potential protein source for some of our foods in China," he told the interviewer.

"Few brands are more expensive than us," Levy bragged in the interview.

And once again, we are faced with the really naive belief that just because a dog food is at the top of the price range, it is not necessarily because the quality of the food is, too. Then there is the added concern about sourcing in China.

And the kicker? You can only purchase the food from specialty retailers with a veterinary prescription. Add another layer of authenticity.

So let's take a look at the list of ingredients that I found on veterinarian Dr. Karen Becker's website at healthypets.mercola.com (search for 'feather meal') and at chewy.com, an online retailer for the Royal Canin Veterinary Diet Anallergenic Dry Dog Food. I was unable to find the product on Royal Canin's website.

The list, according to both websites, contains about 45 ingredients so I'll just give you the first dozen or so:

You will notice the first and therefore largest amount of product in the food is corn starch, a filler, which is a concern because many animals are allergic to corn.

Kind of ironic for an anallergenic product.

Also, corn is very frequently genetically modified. This means the seeds have been chemically altered to produce plants that can withstand repeated spraying with herbicides. In 2009, Monsanto, makers of Roundup, estimated that 60 percent of the corn produced in the United States is genetically modified.

A recent study published in the online journal Entropy into the use of the synthetic herbicide glyphosate, the active ingredient found in Roundup and other weed killers, indicates the chemical has been linked to a range of health problems and diseases, including Parkinson's disease, infertility and cancers in humans.

The second ingredient is the "hydrolyzed poultry by-products aggregate" which is the only mention of poultry in the ingredients, so it has to contain the chicken feathers.

However, the issue here is the term "poultry by-product," which, according to the Association of American Feed Control Officials "consists of the ground, rendered, clean parts of the carcass of slaughtered poultry, such as necks, feet, undeveloped eggs and intestines, exclusive of feathers, except in such amounts as might occur unavoidable in good processing practice." Levy does not address this inconsistency in the Forbes article.

Yuck. Yep, I want my dogs eating the intestines of other animals.

Also on the chewy.com website, a 19.8 pound bag of this stuff costs $86.99.

I will spare you any further rants today so don't get me started on the Royal Canin connection to a bear baiting controversy in the Ukraine.